


Stay

by unicornpoe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - The Reichenbach Fall, Eventual Fluff, John being sad, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Milk solving problems like the BAMF it is, Not Canon Compliant, Reichenbach Feels, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson Being Idiots, Sherlock being beaten, Sherlock in Serbia, So much tea that it will turn you British, Some romance because why else would I write this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-02-07 15:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12843792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicornpoe/pseuds/unicornpoe
Summary: John and Sherlock both begin to suspect that something deeper than friendship connects them. But when Sherlock fakes his own suicide and then comes back, things aren't the same. Is it too late? Or do the Baker Street boys still have a chance at love? Some Language. A ton of feels.





	1. We Are Not Having Sex

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fanfiction, and it hasn't been betad, so I apologize in advance for any errors that might occur. Please enjoy! Also posted on FanFiction.net.

SHERLOCK POV  


Tea. Jam. Sunlight. Rage.  


I don't have to look up to know he's here. John. He pads across the kitchen in socked feet. Hair: damp. (Can tell by sound his fingers make when run through the strands. Scrubby.) Jumper: clean. (Lavender wash detergent. New. Must have run out of unscented and had to borrow from Mrs. Hudson. I remember to complain.) John.  


"Morning, Sherlock," he says cheerfully, crossing to the counter and setting the kettle on to boil. I let myself glance away from the computer screen (not mine. John's. Need it for a case. Terribly important) and at him. My heart stutters, which is a normal human reaction to seeing an object that incites both emotional and physical pleasure, and yet I am still shocked by it. One of the only things that ever shocks me. Been happening since the day I met him. Conclusion: I should be over it (him) by now, but I'm not (never will be).  


"It's ten thirty," I say. I look at him. Wait for him to turn around.  


He does. (Predictable.) Eyebrows up. Mouth in a pleasant line. "Yeah, ok, it is," he says. Mouth shifts; is now a half smile. I think about telling him that he shouldn't be allowed to smile like that. Then I think about telling him that he shouldn't be allowed to smile at anyone like that but me. I do neither.  


"I take it your date was acceptable?" I say, because it's true. She isn't in his bed (didn't even come home with him last night) but he looks happy and he got a full night of sleep (no nightmares; no screaming; I know because I made sure). John is content.  


The kettle whistles and he turns, pouring two cups. Over his shoulder he says, "Tea?" Even though he's already poured mine and spooned the sugar in. I can taste it.  


"Obviously," I say, and then wonder why John's obtusity doesn't annoy me like other people's does. Perhaps because no one else makes tea like this. Or perhaps because of that smile.  


John picks up both cups and sits down across from me at our table, shoving a plate of fingernails and a dissertation about tomato seeds out of his way. He's still smiling. "Date was fine," he says. "Evelyn's interested in what you do. What we do." Smile is bigger. I feel like smashing something. "Wants to meet you."  


I force myself to look back down at John's laptop. Scan pictures of third degree burns until my mind stops wheeling. Look back up. "To meet me," I repeat in a monotone. "Does she have a missing sibling that she wants me to find? Grandmother? Lover? Because those are so tedious, John─”  


"Sherlock─”  


"We're on the middle of something monumental for Lestrade right now John, you know that, I don't have time─”  


"Sherlock."  


"To cater to the whims of one of your vapid, temporary bedfellows─”  


“WILLIAM SHERLOCK SCOTT HOLMES."  


My head jerks up and I stare at him. Sun comes in a steady stream through the window behind me and bathes John. He glows. I wonder if this is what the Egyptian sun god Ra looked like, his hair an iridescent halo, his skin kissed with gold. I doubt that he was half as beautiful.  


John knows my whole name.  


“Who told you?” I ask. (Maybe Mycroft.) (Definitely Mycroft.) ( Asshat.) I allow him to lift one of my hands and wrap my fingers around my cup of tea. Warm. The mug, and his skin when it makes firm contact with mine. I want to wrap myself in him.  


He doesn't answer my last question, his own average brain still caught up on my first. “No missing family. No lovers, either. At least I hope. That'd be bloody embarrassing for me,” he chuckles. He thinks he's amusing. I don't, but I keep my opinions to myself. John's eyes meet mine over the rim of his cup. Blue today. (Not always blue. Sometimes brown. Sometimes grey. Always beautiful.) “You don't have to do any deducing with this one, Sherlock. In fact, I'd prefer if you didn't. Just... be pleasant.”  


“You aren't providing me with sufficient information, John,” I say. I drink the tea automatically. (Fact: Displays comfort. Displays the fact that we are falling into some sort of routine, John and I, and that it is becoming normal and regular for me to sit down every morning and have tea with my flatmate.) Sugar: at least three tablespoons. Poison: none. I remember that time in Baskerville as I sip.  


That is why John now makes the tea.  


John finishes his tea in one long swallow (not good for him) and stands, bringing the cup to the sink where he rinses it carefully and places it in the dishwasher. (Always order. Always calm. It's like the man who screams at night and the man I see in the mornings aren't even the same. Remember to ask him about it. Wonder if that is crossing a metaphorical line. Wonder if I care.) He turns and leans one hip against the counter, crossing his arms and looking level at me. “She just wants to meet you. My flatmate.”  


This implies intimacy between John and this woman. (I do not remember her name. I've deleted it. Not important.) (Correction: possibly important, if this conversation means anything. Which it does.) The fact that she wants to meet the flatmate of her potential sexual partner for reasons beyond business tells me that she is 1. putting up her best front for John (ie trying like the things that he likes, which, in this instance, I suppose she thinks means me) or 2. scoping out the competition by making sure that I am just that: a flatmate. Nothing more. Nothing... sexual.  


“She doesn't have to worry there,” I say out loud. I realize that I want to avoid this meeting at all costs.  


John tilts his head. “You're doing it again.”  


“Doing what?”  


“Having a conversation that no one outside your head understands.”  


“It's simple, John.”  


“Simple for you, Miss Marple. Now explain it out loud.”  


I sigh. “Your potential mate wants to ensure that you and I aren't having sex, John.”  


It's a good thing John has already set his cup down, because he definitely would have dropped it. His eyes are enormous and his mouth hangs open. “That we aren't _what?"_  


“Having sex,” I repeat, annoyed. Fact: he heard me the first time and, fact: he is simply reiterating in order to establish better understanding and, fact: it won't help.  


“Why─why─why─why the hell would she think _that?"_ John explodes. Indignant. And yet I can see his pulse leaping at the base of his throat, dancing just above the thick cream weave of his jumper. Erratic. I want to touch it, but I doubt that that would help my case, so I refrain. It takes an admirable amount of restraint. (Remember to reward myself in the form of body parts from the morgue. Molly will understand.)  


“Two grown men living together a tiny flat, one perpetually single, one chronically unable to keep a girlfriend─”  


“Hey!”  


“Who run about and solve crimes with impressive like-mindedness and demonstrate remarkably few personal space boundaries,” I finish, going back to my computer screen.  


“Excuse me, I have completely normal personal space boundaries. You're the one who hangs all over me at crime scenes, Sherlock Holmes,” he says in a clipped tone. I raise my eyebrows but don't look at him. It's obviously a struggle for him to keep his voice under control, but he manages. (Ever the soldier.) “Evelyn is coming over tonight. We are getting take out.” He says it like he's giving orders. I find that I don't mind. “You will be nice─”  


“I'm always nice.”  


“You will be _nice,_ and you will not embarrass me, and _no talking about sex._ Got it?” he growls.  


I ignore the growl. It's best. “Of course, John. Anything for you."

JOHN POV

This is going to be a fucking disaster.  


“...and so I said of course I can take on seven kittens, love, I only have a dog and two birds back at the flat, it's not like I'm _busy,_ or anything,” Evelyn laughs, rolls her eyes, leans forward towards Sherlock who's sitting across from us and looking stoic. He leans fractionally backwards. Luckily she's looking back at me now, and misses the look of unadulterated disgust that he sends her way.  


“That's─that's funny, Evelyn,” I say, and laugh. Evelyn might have missed it, but there's no way in hell Sherlock didn't catch how fake it was. I very carefully do not look at my flatmate.  


Evelyn's enormous smile calcifies slightly and the cup of red wine in her hand tilts dangerously to the left as she stares at me. “No it's not funny, John, it's─it's─”  


“Unfair on the part of your sister because she knows you're busy with your many other mammal obligations. Fact: your sister doesn't care about your life so, fact: your sister is an ass.”  


Jesus Christ.  


I let myself look at him─really look─for the first time since Evelyn got here. He's wearing one of his ridiculous suits with a black shirt underneath, buttons straining because god forbid he ever wear something that has a bit of give to it other than that coat, and he's lounging in his chair, legs crossed at the knee, like a king. I wonder why I thought this would be a good idea. This is _not a good idea._ Evelyn's probably going to want to sleep with him, instead, sitting there looking as gorgeous as he does─  


“That's exactly what I meant.” Evelyn smiles at him. It's her twenty-four-karat smile, the one that first dazzled me in the clinic last Monday and led to her sitting in our living room and flashing it at him. She tears her eyes away (he's not even smiling back, she's got absolutely nothing to go on, and yet she's looking at him like he hung the moon, like he is the moon, and damn why is it so hot in here?) and glances at me. “Pay attention, John,” she says, mockingly playful.  


“Yes John, do pay attention,” Sherlock murmurs from his chair.  


“So, ah,” I say loudly, taking a bite of my curry and wracking my brain for something to say. “Anything you wanted to ask the great Sherlock Holmes?” As soon as it's out of my mouth I wish it was back in. He's going to hate this. He probably already hates this. _I_ hate this. Horrified, my gaze darts to him, but his face is smooth and impassive. If I didn't know him as well as I do I wouldn't have a clue anything was wrong.  


But I do.  


“Oh, of course, but who doesn't?” Evelyn giggles. I think about taking her wine away, and then I give myself a mental slap. She isn't a child. And we're on _date_ for god's sake. I shouldn't be worrying about Sherlock, I should be worrying about the pretty woman that I have here in my flat. “What's it like?” she asks, leaning forward again. “Having such a large brain?”  


I send Sherlock a look that I hope translates to _please don't be an ass_ because even _I_ realize that that was an incredibly stupid question and then lean back, closing my eyes in silent prayer. _Dear whatever is up there. Please let him be pleasant._  


Sherlock stays perfectly still in his chair, but his stillness says more than anybody elses squirms would. He's been sitting like this the whole time (because even if I didn't let myself look at him I can still feel what he's doing, sense his pissy moods) not eating or drinking or talking. I thought it was awkward then. Now I long for it.  


“The relationship between brain size and intelligence, both among humans and between different species, has never been particularly well-defined,” Sherlock begins. His gaze is steadily fixed on Evelyn, and I get an absurd urge to push her out of the way and make him stare at me. “Humans like to believe that our exceptional cognitive abilities must indicate that we are the kings of the animal kingdom in terms of brain size, or at least that we have the largest brains relative to our body size. Both of these common assumptions are incorrect. Whales and elephants have much bigger brains than humans, and we have about the same brain-to-body mass ratio as mice. Since it would be against human nature to admit defeat, scientists have crafted a third measure of brain size called the encephalization quotient, which is the ratio of actual brain mass relative to the predicted brain mass for an animal’s size (based off the assumption that larger animals require slightly less brain matter relative to their size compared to very small animals). By this metric, at least, humans come out on top, with an EQ of seven point five far surpassing the dolphin’s five point three and the mouse’s measly zero point five. However to say that my brain is bigger than, say, John's─” and he's up out of his chair now and kneeling in front of us, his forehead against mine, his hands on either side of my skull as he measures. _Please grant me the strength not to throttle the living daylights out of him, amen._ “─is not determinable without extensive x-rays.” He pulls back, hands still cupping my temples, and now he's staring at me. “Which I would be more than willing to have Molly run, if you'd like,” he offers.  


“Molly isn't even qualified─” I begin, but now he's standing again and he isn't looking at me anymore, he's looking back down at Evelyn, and─  


“My intelligence is more significant than my partner's, though, which does lead normal people to believe that my brain might naturally be larger than his is.” He finally smiles at her (I wonder how I ever found Evelyn's smile sunny, compared with the blinding thing that lights up his face now) and then turns that smile on me, and even I can tell he wants us to be impressed. Wants me to be impressed.  


Of course I fucking am. And he better be glad, too, because if I wasn't there's no guarantee that Sherlock Holmes would live to see another day after tonight.  


“Staggering,” I say, because that's my job. Trail along behind him and watch as he boggles the minds of everyone he meets, and then offer up accolades when everyone else is too speechless to say anything. It's annoying that I don't mind.  


He blinks at me. “You've expanded you're vocabulary.”  


I give him a half smile. “Thought you might be getting bored with the old phrases.”  


His smile softens a little around the edges and does something funny to my stomach. (Maybe it's not the smile. Maybe it's the curry. I tell myself it's the curry.) “You never bore me, John Watson.”  


“Are you kidding me right now?”  


It's Evelyn. Damn─she exists. I jump like I'm scared (might be true) and my curry tumbles off my lap and into the floor. I hear Sherlock make an admonishing noise but I'm not paying attention to him, not right now. I'm staring at Evelyn who's staring at both of us. Her head whips back and forth like one of those bobble-headed things that underpaid taxi drivers and old men who work in paper companies put in their car windows, and her mouth hangs in a perfect O. O for orange. O for of-bloody-course this date isn't going to work out, either. I open mine too but she starts speaking immediately and I know that any chance I might have had at this (us) (Evelyn and me) is gone for good now.  


“Was this some sort of joke?” She's holding on to her glass tightly now, knuckles grooved and white, and I'm afraid she's going to break it. Those glasses aren't even ours (Sherlock's and mine). They belong to Mrs. Hudson. (Imagine if we broke one of Mrs. Hudson's wine glasses. She's had them since her wedding.) (On second thought, she might not mind.)  


“Evelyn,” I say, because nothing springs to mind. No witty rejoinders or easy outs. Sherlock could think of something if he wanted to. But he doesn't want to. I don't even have to look at him to know that. But it doesn't matter because there is no pause in her stream of words. No way I can interrupt. Probably best. (Definitely best.)  


“Did you jut invite me over to have a good laugh?” She asks, even though I'm pretty sure we all know the answer to that question. Invited herself over, didn't she, wanting to know all about the infamous Sherlock Holmes and his faithful sidekick Dr. John Watson. Well, now she does. “You aren't even good at hiding it, you know, John, it's written all over both of your faces, and I suspected from the minute I walked in but I said to myself, I said 'No, Evelyn, give them a chance, you could be wrong' but I wasn't, was I John? I wasn't wrong.” She stands, still holding the glass, and grabs her purse from where it sits wedged between us on the sofa. She clutches it to her chest with one hand as she kicks her way through my spilled curry and stomps to the door. “I hope you know what a terrible person you are, John Watson,” she hisses at me.  


“We aren't having sex,” says Sherlock helpfully.  


“Like hell you aren't!” Evelyn shouts back, shoving her purse under her arm and flipping both of us off with expert precision. She downs the wine and then drops the glass in such a way that it has to be deliberate. It shatters on the floor. A shard skids under the sofa. And then she is gone, her heels clicking in an asymmetrical rhythm down the stairs. The echo of the slamming door wafts up to us.  


“Not good?”  


And suddenly I'm mad. I can feel myself heating up, my skin tightening across my face, my hands winding tightly into themselves. I turn to Sherlock. He's just standing there, his arms hanging at his sides, his palms brushing loosely against his thighs, his fingers gently curled. His face is smooth, untroubled, nothing but an almost microscopic crease between his delicate eyebrows belying anything other than cool impassivity, and I doubt that that shred of concern he does have is for anything other than the curry and the wine littering the floor. He doesn't have a clue. Not a single goddamn clue.  


(I get the feeling that I don't have a clue either, that I'm even more lost than he is, lost in the feeling that I'm _relieved_ that Evelyn is gone and we are alone again, and I don't want to think about it.)  


I see the moment he realizes that I am, in fact, 'not good.' The crease deepens. I shake.  


“Of course it's not good, Sherlock, you completely ruined my date. Again! How many times are you going to do this? First it was Sarah, then Karen, then─then─”  


“Stacy.”  


“Right, Stacy.” (I actually don't mind that that one ended. She'd collected cat skulls and second hand pom-pom balls. But still.) “This is the _fourth time,_ Sherlock. It's ridiculous. What the hell do you have against me that you're constantly trying to sabotage my life? Can you just not resist ruining every bit of happiness that I have that's not related to you?”  


Immediately I know I've gone too far. Sherlock doesn't move and yet he seems to shrink, growing smaller, losing some of that unique arrogance that makes him him. His arms are stiff now, long pale fingers curled in on themselves like mine are, but not with anger. His eyes cloud and the crease is now a divot, a canyon, an imperfection on an otherwise perfect image, and something that nobody would notice but me. (I want to reach up and smooth it away with my own fingers. I want to feel his cool skin under my hands, his perfect forehead, to let my fingers slide down and trace the bow of his lips. To run my thumbs across velvety eyelids and stroke the thin, straight bridge of his nose. I want to feel him.) My anger is gone but a small part of me, a part of me that is used to living in places where admitting weakness or defeat meant being weak and somehow less, anchors my voice deliberately in my throat. And I am mute, helpless to do anything but watch him sink in on himself and know that it is my fault.  


I forget sometimes how much he needs to know. To know that he is perfect. To know that he is enough.  


Sherlock doesn't say anything. He just turns and walks into his bedroom, the door shutting with an impossibly soft snick that leaves my feeling empty and frustrated.

He starts playing his violin at midnight. I can tell he's composing, the melodies weaving and winding and leaving me breathless beneath my thin cotton sheet as I listen. I fall asleep eventually to the haunting soar of a chromatic scale, played over and over. When I wake up, he is gone.


	2. Milk: A Peace Offering

SHERLOCK'S POV

I am getting the milk.  


Fact: getting the milk is considerably more terrifying than I had expected. I had forgotten that humans other than John and I require milk. (Stupid.) The Tesco where I am at is crowded and busy, which I suppose is normal for a Saturday morning, and my mind will not keep still.  


I see humans. So many humans. All ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, and their babble is huge, a wave that's crushing me, and I can't remember if John takes whole milk or two percent and he is angry at me, with me, at me, angry, angry, angry, I am a burden, a disaster, a mistake, and his happiness is gone now because of me, and _I just need to bring him the milk and it will all be fixed─_  


I stumble forward and catch myself on the middle shelf of the refrigerator. The cool metal of the shelf cuts into my palms and I lean into it, needing to feel the pain to clear my head. Cool air begins to numb the front half of my body, a kind of detox by temperature. (Fact: I am motivated by dangerous things.) Think: what does John come home with every Saturday after his shopping? What does the carton that is currently sitting on the bottom shelf of our fridge next to Paul Tennyson's severed head say? I close my eyes tightly. Picture it.  


Whole milk.  


My eyes snap open and I am inches away from a tub of sour cream. I ignore it, reach down instead to the row of milk cartons, and grab the one that I need. (I feel sick. What if it isn't enough? What if milk isn't enough? Do donated dairy products make up for multiple lost chances at happiness─at love? I hate questions. I want to ask John. He knows everything. My blogger. My conductor of light.) I push myself slowly out of the refrigerator and tuck the carton under my right arm as I turn. People are staring at me.  


It is nothing that I'm not used to.  


As I walk quickly to the checkout counters, some of my panic dissolves and flashes of conversation are able to penetrate my whirling brain. A woman, her levels of vexation evident in the shrillness of her tone. Arms: held stiff at her sides. Hair: platinum blonde, roots showing, not washed in one (no, two) days. Clothing: wrinkled, too flashy for a Saturday morning, worn yesterday. Purchasing: a stick of deodorant, and in her cart, a t-shirt and sweatpants. I sidestep closer to her and as I come around the edge, I see a man standing before her. Face: broken.  


I know what is happening without hearing a single word.  


I could say something. I could tell him what he obviously already suspects: that she was not where she said she was last night. That she doesn't love him anymore. That neither of them are happy.  


Instead, I pay for the milk.

 

It is raining outside. The drops leave silvery trails down the window of my cab, and I can see the grey cast of the sky through them. I sigh, squish in the sides of the milk carton in my lap with my hands, and tap my foot hastily on the floor. I need a smoke. I need this bloody cabby to drive faster than a snail. (Fact: this would be an inadvisable thing for said cabby to do, seeing as we are currently in the midst of a steady flow of traffic.)  


I find that the prospect of vehicular injury doesn't bother me if it means I get home to John more quickly.  


The cab turns onto Baker Street and I lean forward in my seat, tossing a wad of cash (ten pounds) onto the center console. I gather my milk. My peace offering. “Let me out here,” I say.  


“Mate─” begins the cabby, but I ignore him. Open the door onto the flow of traffic (the cab is still moving but only at that same slow pace, so I remain uninjured) and stride out into it. Rain immediately soaks me. (Don't care. Rain is irrelevant.) I weave my way purposefully across the busy road and ignore the myriad angry beeps of car horns until I reach the other side.  


I vault myself over the guard rail that has recently been installed on the side of our (John's and mine) road due to construction or something of that sort. Fix my scarf. Run to the door of 221B and pull it open and then take the steps two at a time.  


Up.  


Up towards John.  


I am nervous. (New feeling. Strange. I am never nervous. I never have any cause to be.) (I have never ruined someones life before.) (I hope the milk is enough.) I hold my breath as I push open the door to our flat.  


John.  


He's in his chair. Legs: crossed. Tea: (a permanent fixture of John Watson) in his right hand. Hair: dry, but messy. Lips: pursed slightly. Like he's just eaten something slightly sour. Like he wants a kiss. Newspaper: spread across his lap. Opened to the sports section. (John couldn't care less about sports. This is how I know things are still not good.)  


He looks up at the noise I make, and I feel my breath catch in my throat. (Why? My mind is blank. I can think of no reason that one person could cause another to lose their breath without physical restriction of the airways. And yet, here I am.) His eyes are red, like he didn't sleep well last night.  


I know that mine look that way as well. I didn't sleep at all.  


John sets his tea down quickly when he sees me and stands. Newspaper falls to the floor. He doesn't notice, and walks on it as he makes his way to me. “Sherlock─” he begins.  


But words fall out of my mouth, surprising both of us. “John, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you, I didn't mean to ruin your life, I didn't _mean─”_ this is wrong, I can feel it. I speak without periods in my sentences. An endless tide of emotions that I don't know I am feeling, that I don't want to express. Why can't I remember the speech that I prepared? It was a very good speech. It had periods. “I want you to be happy more than I want anything else, John, I promise, and if you want to have sex with Evelyn then─”  


_“Sherlock,”_ he says. He's shaking his head back and forth and he looks upset. Upset because of me again. I feel my heart beating in such a wild way that I fear it will break free of its flimsy bindings of flesh and bone and fall at John Watson's feet, laid bare for him to see. It is a terrifying thought.  


“So I got milk,” I say, and thrust the carton at him. He takes it out of my hands. He looks confused. I imagine that that confusion is justified. (Even I don't know what I'm saying. What I'm feeling.) “I never get milk, and I make you sad, and I am so, so sorry John─”  


John isn't even looking at the milk. Fact: I have no facts. Nothing adds up.  


I am at a loss.  


He sets it down on the floor beside him, bending briefly. I see the back of his neck, see where his ashy hair tapers off into a gentle point at the nape, want to touch it with all of my fingers, one by one. I think this as I continue talking, completely unaware of what words are coming out of me. He straightens. Mouth: smiling softly, carefully. Eyes: sad.  


Regretful.  


(I want to tell him to regret nothing. He is not the one ruining _my_ happiness. In fact, I doubt that he could ruin anyone's happiness if he tried. He is sunshine.)  


My words die on my tongue as John lifts his (left) hand and places it across my mouth. Fact: an effective method, made all the more effective by its element of complete and total unexpectedness. I stop breathing. (If I breathe he might stop touching me. I never want him to stop touching me.) His skin is warm. Just like yesterday. Just like always. I wonder what would happen if I parted my lips just wide enough to let my tongue slip free, if I licked the soft palm of John's (left) hand...  


“Shut up, Sherlock,” he says softly. (A stupid thing to say. I already have.) He blinks slowly and I admire the way his lashes feather across his cheeks before those eyes are open once more and looking right into mine. Blue. Blue blue blue blueblue _blueblueblue._  


I am gone.  


“You haven't ruined my life. I was being an idiot last night, I spoke completely out of turn, I didn't even _like_ Evelyn─” I know this isn't true. It is a testament to the overwhelming goodness of my John that he is saying these things to me, and I feel my atria and and ventricles constrict in my chest. _John._ “And it's me who should be apologizing. I wanted to say something last night but I...” he trails off and slowly takes his hand away from my mouth, bringing it down to rest on my (right) shoulder. I wish, suddenly and vehemently, that I was not wearing so many layers of clothing. I cannot feel the warmth of him through all of this.  


I breathe. (Fact: I should not have held my breath that long. Feel slightly dizzy. Or maybe that is just the closeness of John.) “So did I,” I say. Because it's true. I wanted to go to him last night. I wanted to beg for forgiveness and make him wrap me in his arms and tell me that everything was going to be ok. Instead, I walked the halls of our flat and made things up on my violin. “Instead...”  


John laughs lightly. Just a breath of mirth that smells like mint and Earl Grey and feels warm against my cold cheeks. I lean in, only half aware of what I'm doing. “Thank you for the milk,” he says. He is suddenly serious, his tone lowering. “I really appreciate it, Sherlock. I do. You are...” he doesn't finish his sentence again. (He shouldn't begin a sentence if he isn't going to finish it.) (I want to know what I am.) “You're wet...” he says. His brow wrinkles, and I know that that isn't what he'd meant to say at all.  


“Buying milk is difficult and stressful,” I say. It's true, but not necessarily what I had wanted to say, either. I remember my panic at the Tesco. It is waning, but still there, rooted deep inside of me in a place that one could not find on any X-ray.  


John puts his other hand on my (left) shoulder and I feel a shudder start at the base of my spine and work its way up through my skull. John. He smells like lavender again and I decide that maybe I don't hate it. Face: still serious. Still regretful. “I know it is,” he says. He isn't mocking me like anyone else is. He knows me so well. “And I know I complain about having to do all of the shopping but I don't mean any of it, Sherlock. You are... you are─are─you're perfect.” His voice turns into a fierce whisper. We both tilt our heads (Mine: down) (John's: in) until our foreheads almost meet. My heart is now in my throat, which _should not_ be physically possible. “You make me happy, Sherlock Holmes. To hell with everybody else. I─” John stops. Licks his lips. Swallows. I can hear his heart beating, and I smile when I realize that it's in time with my own. I am suffused with heat. “I'm sorry,” he whispers.  


My words are gone. Instead of answering, I lower my head until it wrests on John's shoulder, my nose and the edge of my cheek against the burning skin of his collar bone and neck. My eyelashes flutter shut. Brush John's neck: he shivers at the contact. I lift my arms. Slide them around his waist. Squeeze. Sigh.  


He is stiff at first. Tense. (Did I go to far?) (Don't care if I did.) (Like the feel of him.) (John.) But a fraction of a second later he melts against me. He slides his hands from my shoulders to my back, pulling me closer to him, and nestles his head in my shoulder. He is breathing more quickly than he usually does. (Even his breaths are normal. Regulated. Precise. Not so today.) He makes a noise in the back of his throat. I pretend that I don't hear it.  


Unexpected fact: when I hold him, John Watson is mine.


	3. The Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about not posting for a while... finals. But I'm sure I don't have to explain that stress to most of you.  
> Anyway, thank you for the kudos and the reads, and here's another angsty chapter to reward you with! Comments much appreciated!!

THREE MONTHS LATER  


JOHN'S POV

Sherlock's never gotten the milk before. He's never going to do it again.  


He's never going to do anything again.  


Crown jewels. National banks. _Court, testify, Sherlock, run, run, run─_  


Jim Moriarty. Richard Brook.  


That bastard.  


He will ruin us.  


I am standing in the middle of the road, my neck craned upwards, a cellphone pressed hard against my left ear.  


Sherlock is up there.  


He's going to do it.  


He's going to jump─  


He's not going to jump.  


He wouldn't─  


“Oh god,” I say, because it's all I _can_ say right now, all that my throat will allow me to release. This cannot be happening. I must have hit my head all those months ago when Sherlock brought me that carton of milk and all of these events that came after that have been the result of some horrific coma that I fell into─  


“I... I... I can't come down so we'll... we'll just have to do it like this.” I have never heard him stutter before in the whole time that I've known him, never once heard him falter like this. Never with this much sorrow in his voice.  


Wind blows and ruffles the curls on his head. Those goddamn perfect curls.  


“What's going on?” I say, even knowing exactly what's going on. My heart threatens to kick a hole straight through my chest and leave me gaping and hollow.  


“An apology. It's all true.”  


“W-what?”  


The phone is freezing pressed against my ear, the world is freezing around me with him up there, doing this, saying these words to me. I brace myself as he opens his mouth, says brokenly, “Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty.”  


I see as he glances briefly behind him, and I begin to wonder before other thoughts take me over and pull words out of me, senseless words, words that do not mean anything close to what I want to say to this man. “Why are you saying this?”  


He looks back down at me. “Because I'm a fake.” His voice breaks, and I want to run to him and grab him and hold him to me and never let him go but I'm not working correctly, and all that my mind screams at me is, _stay where you are. He told you to stay where you are. Do not move one muscle._  


“Sherlock,” I say, but the moment rushes by far too fast. He's moved on to other words, and I am that many words closer to being witness to something that is going to break him. Break me. Break us.  


“The newspapers were right all along,” he says. I hear tears in his voice, can see them in his eyes even from this far away, can feel them like a burn in my heart. “I want you to tell Lestrade. I want you to tell Mrs. Hudson, and Molly... in fact tell anyone that will listen to you that I created Moriarty for my own purposes.” He is so horribly emphatic and I know it isn't real, I _know─_  


“Okay, shut up, Sherlock, shut up,” my words stumble over each other in my mouth, racing to get out, racing to be said before this is over, “The first time we met... _the first time we met_ you knew all about my sister, right?”  


“Nobody could be that clever─”  


_“You could.”_  


I am emphatic now, too, just as much as he was, because I _know._ This man before me, this brilliant, beautiful, wonderful man─he could. He could be anything. He could be everything. He _is_ everything.  


He is my everything.  


Sherlock laughs (not a laugh of mirth. A laugh of desperation, of hopelessness, and _my god─_ ) and I see a tear run down the side of his face, dripping and then falling, falling, falling down to the pavement below. I close my eyes before it hits. Listen to the rawness of his words. “I researched you. Before we met I discovered everything that I could to... to impress you.” His voice, always so strong, always so sure, always in control, wobbles again. Is small. And that scares me more than almost anything else in this moment. “It's a trick. Just a magic trick.”  


I am shaking my head over and over again as if the action will clear his words, his position, the last three months. As if there really _is_ a magic trick that he can do, one that I set off by shaking my head, one that will take us back to when he was braving Tesco lines for me and I was being held by him in our flat, warm and safe and─  


“No.” I say, and my voice sounds harsh and it hurts me. “Alright, stop it now.” I forget my resolve to stay where I am and take a step forward. To him. Red lights are flashing behind my eyes, alarms and ringing through my ears, and I want to grab him and hold his head to my chest─  


“No stay exactly where you are!” he says and he's so urgent. _Stay._ I stop dead in my tracks. Maybe if I stay it will fix it. “Don't move.”  


I step back and my hand drifts up to him of its own accord, every part of my being screaming to get closer to him. “All right.” It's a stupid thing to say. I expect him to tell me so.  


(I want him to tell me so. I want him to come down here on the fucking _steps_ and press me to him and tell me I'm an idiot.)  


His chest is hitching under his billowing coat. Up, down, up, down, fast, and his own arm is stretched toward mined. I imagine a string that leads from my hand to his, connecting us, keeping us tethered. An unbreakable string. I want to hold his hand.  


It hits me hard, there in the road. All the things that I want are him.  


“Keep your eyes fixed on me,” he says, and his voice is rising with panic. Frantic. Almost hysterical. The hand that he has extended to mine trembles. “Please, will you do this for me?”  


_I will do anything for you, Sherlock Holmes._ “Do what?”  


“This phone call, it’s... it’s my note. It’s what people do, don’t they?” he asks this plaintively, and I am reminded forcibly of Moriarty in that swimming pool screaming _that's what people do!_ “Leave a note?”  


I shake my head and lift the phone slightly away from my ear, not wanting to hear what he's saying to me. I understand everything for once. I wonder if this is how he constantly feels, overwhelmed and anguished and broken─ I raise it again and when I speak, my voice is shaking.  


“Leave a note when?” I ask him, even though I know. He likes when I ask questions, I think almost absently. He likes it.  


There is a pause. I become aware of the strangest things: the sound of traffic behind me. The slap of sneakered feet on pavement. The scuttle of dried out leaves rushing down the road in the wind.  


The angle of the man's face above me, his head tilted to the side, the corners of his perfect lips turned down, the shaking of all of him.  


“Goodbye, John,” he says.  


It's soft. Gentle. Apologetic. It's a gift to me from him, I know. A gesture of kindness, of friendship. Like the milk. But it does the opposite of what it's intended to do and I feel a jolt run through me, as if someone has shot me with a bolt of electricity. I'm shaking my head again. “No. _Don't.”_ My words spill out. Futile.  


Sherlock stares at me. His piercing eyes are softened, rimmed with light pink, and there are tears on his smooth skin. Our eyes meet and I feel him, know him. Like I always have. Like I have since the day that I met him.  


My heart is pounding harder than it ever has, working its way up, up, up─  


He tosses the phone behind him onto the roof.  


I form words but they will not break free.  


His gaze is raised to the skyline. Away from me.  


“No,” I say, and then I am screaming louder than I ever have before, louder than I ever did during Afghanistan, louder than I ever have at night, screaming with every single fiber of my being, screaming my heart out into the cold air, _“SHERLOCK!”_  


He spreads his arms to either side.  


He falls.  


_“Sher...”_ But my body will not allow me to form another word. I watch as he falls gently, gracefully, that _goddamn coat_ flowing out behind him and around him and I think that maybe it will catch him, maybe it will stop him, and then his limbs wheel when he is just feet from the pavement and my mind is a blank slate of white noise, nothing but Sherlock Sherlock Sherlock _Sherlock SherlockSherlockSherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlocksherlock─_  


He hits the ground.


	4. Sherlock After the Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy! Comments would be lovely.

SHERLOCK'S POV

I knew I wasn't going to die.

Even as I watched Moriarty insert the gun into his gaping maw. Even as I watched him shoot, blasting himself backwards with a grotesque sort of grin on his face, and strike the cement behind him. Even as I watched a pool of black blood spread thickly out from his skull. Even as I stood on the edge of Bart's roof top, my arms spread, staring down from dizzying heights. Even as I fell, John's ravaged scream in my ear.

I am laying on the pavement now. Cold. Hard. Unforgiving. Fact: nobody else in the world would have survived this plunge. 

I hear voices around me now, a tumble and a swarm of words that I don't care about. I shut them out. Listen. Listen, and force my body to be still, my lungs to collapse in on themselves. I hear many sets of footsteps around me but wait for only one.

Fact: I know the sound of his gait better than I know the sound of my own. Slightly heavier than the average person's. Purposeful. Even now, even with the irregular hurried rhythm of it, I can tell who he is. John Watson.

John.

John—

_“Sherlock, Sherlock.”_ It's a whisper but my whole being is so finely tuned to him that I have no trouble discerning his voice over everyone else. “I'm a doctor, let me come through.” He is closer now. On the edge of the crowd surrounding me. Voice: pained. Something in me that has been threatening to break since the moment that all of this began and the idea of John being hurt (of John being killed) first came to my mind now twists deep inside of me. Weakens. Almost cracks. I can feel panic in my throat. It isn't over yet. He's still in danger.

(The tears that came involuntarily from me on the roof top now burn behind my eyes. I keep myself furiously still.)

(Dead.)

“Let me come through, please.” I can tell that he feels more panic even than I do. Tone: weaker than it usually is. Higher. And, I think, truer. This is the John Watson that he thinks no one ever sees. The one that was broken in a war that broke thousands. The one that breaks anew when the stars are hung high above a sleeping London as I stand in the shadows outside of his door.

I see him. I know him. All of him.

I hurt.

They are trying to hold him back and to keep him from me. “No, he's my friend,” utters John brokenly. An organic phrase, pouring out of his mouth in such a way that I know it must be true. His friend. I feel pride in those words. I am (was) (was) (I hate the word was) friend to John Watson, the bravest and kindest and most wonderful man that has ever lived.

And I know that if I die, I will die satisfied. That is the greatest thing that I ever could have hoped to accomplish.

“He's my friend. Please,” he says, even though he's already through. I feel him stir near me. He reaches down and grabs at my wrist.

And I almost sit up and throw my arms around him and abandon all of this.

But I don't. I can't. Fact: somewhere around us there is a sniper with his scope fixed unerringly on my friend, ready to shoot the moment they see I am not dead, and fact: there would be no point in my living at all if John was not there to live with me.

He is shaken and undone and tragic and his hand is warm around my wrist, even as it trembles. That thing inside me bursts now. Floods me with sorrow, despair, rage. (Do not know what this thing is. Know only that it _hurts._ )

I want him to hold onto me forever. If my heart had been beating, if my lungs had been working, they both would have been racing faster than even I knew was possible. But someone reaches down and comes between us, peeling his fingers away. (Asshole.) (For the best.)

A stretcher comes, wheeled by medics that are far too late.

“Please, let me just...” he doesn't fight. He is broken. And yet his words are frantic and I can feel his intent in them. He falls. (My body tenses when he does this. If I can feel his small descent all the way down to my bones, then how did it feel for him? Did his body break when mine fell from such heights? Hope not.)

Two people take hold of me and gently roll me onto my back. I hear John groan (utterly despairing) as my blood stained face and wide, glassy, staring eyes are revealed to him. A choking noise escapes him, a noise that sounds like broken things and a knot of tears in his throat. “Jesus, no,” he murmurs, trying to stand but sinking again, back down onto his knees and into the arms of people who don't deserve to touch him as he stares at me. “God, no.”

(Remember: the second day that I had known him, hearing him yell about his leg in pure fury. Me, making a decision that would ultimately change both of our lives. Taking the steps back upstairs two at a time, something closer to hope in me than I had felt in a long time. Asking him to come. And John's words. “God, yes.” Things are so different now. Things hurt, now.)

Four pairs of hands lift me. Arms: stiff. They know there's no saving me. I'm lowered onto a stretcher and then rapidly wheeled away.

I close my eyes. None of them will notice, I know this. And if they do–and if they do–

And if they do, then I don't care.

I close my eyes, and I remember John.


	5. Do you carry on talking when I'm away?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a nice, big dollop of depression for this holiday. Happy merry joy to you all!

TWO MONTHS AFTER THE FALL

JOHN'S POV

_Someday, we'll all be standing around a body. And Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it there._

I hear Donovan's words from that first day over and over in my mind. A grotesque mantra. I hate them because they're true.

I am Dr. John Hamish Watson, retired army doctor and former Captain of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, a man with a facade of steel and a psychosomatic limp and a penchant for danger and assholes in long coats, and I'm sitting in an empty room. Alone.

The walls are painted a pale colour that's neither grey nor tan nor cream. There's no furniture (no table overflowing with equipment and body parts, no bookshelf that's literally busting at the seams, no chairs that face each other, indents in the cushions from overuse, and certainly no tall man, outrageously expensive dressing gown hanging from his slim shoulders, violin resting beneath his chin) except a bed (unmade) and a desk (empty).

It looks like before. Before I met him. (It isn't the same flat, isn't even in the same area, but that doesn't matter at all.) I even have that same gun tucked there in the top right desk drawer, just waiting for me. (Waiting for me to what? To stick it in the waist of my trousers and go jogging off after a terrorist? To aim it through two windows and blow the bloody arms off of someone? To put the cold steel of it against my temple─)

I'm sitting on the bed now, staring into the bland, colourless space around me. My feet are planted firmly on the ground, side by side in their bland, colourless socks. My hands are are laying flat on my thighs. Fingers straight. Thumbs splayed out. My spine is straight and long, and runs right up to meet the back of my neck, keeping my head held high. I haven't moved for half an hour.

It's hard to move at all now.

I don't live at Baker Street anymore. I thought I could do it, and I tried for about three weeks, but the rooms were too empty, too peaceful, and they smelled too nice. So I packed up just enough of my stuff to live off of and moved to the cheapest place I could find. It's out in the suburbs somewhere. I have about a thirty minute drive to work, which would be a problem if I still actually went to work. (They gave me a few months off. Said they understood. Said I needed time. But my time's coming to an end now and I still don't feel any better and I still think of him every single goddamn day, those eyes and that brain and the blood on the pavement and _god─)_

I asked them all to stay away. Lestrade, and Molly, even Mrs. Hudson─I didn't say anything to Mycroft and he didn't say anything to me, nothing except a thin slip of paper that I found on my pillow the morning after the fall with some shite about his shared grief that I trashed before I could even finish reading it. I just don't think I can see them without thinking about She─

My chest hitches. Sternum: pulled in tightly, compressing down on my lungs and making it impossible to breathe. I've been doing so well today. Just sitting here on my bed for the past (countless) hours and breathing shallowly and slowly and not thinking about... hell, about anything. My mind a blank slate. My mind a buzz of white noise. My mind empty. Like always.

But now. Not now. Something triggered it, flipped a switch that looses a stream of images through my mind so quickly that I can't concentrate on any one of them and have to collapse forward, my head between my knees and my fingers laced tightly over the back of my neck. Sherlock in the lab at Bart's, staring at me like I'm a wonderful puzzle worth solving; Sherlock, giving me a look of pure horror as I ask him if he has a boyfriend; Sherlock, leaving a crime scene by my side and giggling like a kid at Christmas; Sherlock, shooting the wall with scary precision; Sherlock, sawing at his violin and making a noise that should have put me off but instead calmed me to sleep, Sherlock poisoning my tea, Sherlock being a dick to every body he ever met and at the same time charming them so damn much that they (I) would follow him into hell, Sherlock wrapped in a sheet in the middle of Buckingham palace, Sherlock handing me a carton of milk with wide, vulnerable eyes, Sherlock giving me that smile that let me know I wasn't particularly clever but he made an exception for me anyhow─

And, because I'm a disgrace to myself, I get up and stumble across the room. I'm still not breathing (problem; that's a problem) but I'm not crying, either. And that's good, I remind myself. I reach my desk and wrench open the drawer with my gun in it─it sticks─I pull harder─it gives with a squeak that I barely hear. Hand: in the drawer, knocking my gun into the wooden side, closing around a pad of paper and a pen. I turn mechanically (my chest is moving again. Why do I still hurt so deeply?) and slide to the floor, my back against the hard wooden desk.

I look at what I'm holding. A plain yellow pad of paper. Bottom right corner of the first five pages torn through. Lines faded. Bought it years ago, tossed it in the bottom of a box that I've never unpacked until this move, and here we are. I feel an obscure sense of guilt when I look at it, even though I know that I've done nothing wrong. (But what if I have? What if the whole reason he's gone is because of me? If I'd just stayed there in the lab with him for a few minutes more, just asked him what was wrong, maybe he wouldn't be─maybe he'd still be─)

My eyes glance over the first few notes that I've written here, and my brain registers only a few words out of what's written. They're mostly angry sentences so far, things that were products of nightmares worse than any since my first month after being discharged, but all of the anger is just hiding the complete and total sorrow buried deep inside my core. I flip the pages a few times until I find a clean one and set the pen down.

Begin to write.

_Sherlock._

_I should be over you by now. Everyone says so. Ella's the only one who says it out loud, though. (Ella's my therapist. I know you don't remember because you don't consider it important, so I'm just going to save you the trouble of asking and tell you.) But they don't understand, do they? How the hell am I supposed to get over someone who saved my life in so many ways? I haven't told Ella that I might not be here anymore if it weren't for you. And I sure as hell haven't told her that I continue to write to a dead man every day as I sit here in my dark flat with a loaded gun above my head. That would certainly delay progress._

_I asked you not to be dead back there at your grave. I asked even though I didn't really believe that you were. (Because how could you, the great Sherlock Holmes, my best friend, ever die? It's impossible. It's like saying the sun's gone out forever, or the queen has gone and resigned. Impossible.) So I'm going to ask something different now, Sherlock, and you are going to listen to me this time, whether you are dead or not._

_Sherlock Holmes. Come back home to me._

_John._

SHERLOCK'S POV

Fact: This is not as fun as I had thought it would be.

Moriarty's network is a complicated web of lies and murder and devoted lackeys. It is tangled and convoluted. It spans the world, from England (where I want to be) to Scandinavia (incredibly boring. Only took me two days to take down everyone there) to Africa (that was fun, actually. That was very fun) to Pakistan (where I am now) and beyond. I lean against a (stone) wall. Let my legs buckle and slide slowly down until I hit the dirty alley, my head tipped back. I stare up at the dark sky above me. A street light flickers at the end of the alley and then dies. I am plunged into total black.

“That was stupid,” John says, sitting next to me. His legs are sprawled out in front of him and his (left) hand is touching my (right) knee. Just brushing it. He probably doesn't even notice. Through pants he says, “You shouldn't have shot at him, Sherlock. You're being reckless.”

“I know,” I say. I whisper it. Unlike John's phantom voice, people can actually hear mine. I try to hush my ragged breaths so that the man that I've just finished running from (I can still hear him blundering about in the dark out there) doesn't decide to come investigate. “I know.”

“He isn't even a part of Moriarty's network,” says John. Voice: beginning to sound amused. Amused, and also worried. “You're just being reckless.”

“I know, John.” I want to look at him, but know that when I do he'll just disappear. I put my pull my knees up to my chest. Cross my arms on top of them. Set my forehead on top of the whole thing. My head hurts.

“Come back home to me, Sherlock,” he says softly. Against my will, I raise my head. His voice: soft, warm, gentle. John. “Come back home.”

I look at him, finally, that place behind my eyes aching with fatigue and sorrow and he immediately disappears. (Fact: I knew that he would.) (Fact: That doesn't make it hurt any less.)

“I want to,” I whisper to the empty concrete beside me. There is nothing but dirt and weeds and broken glass where he was. (John.) “I want to come home.”

It's true. I do. There must be something wrong with me (something else wrong with me) because I've realized that I just don't want to do this without him. I don't want to run without him and his shorter legs, hustling to keep up with me. I don't want to say clever things without his exclamations cheering me on. (“Amazing!” “Brilliant!” “Fantastic!” And, more recently, “Staggering!” I like staggering best.) I don't even want to drink my tea if he hasn't made it. (Not that I've had much chance for tea lately. Too little time spent in one place for a cuppa.)

Not good.

I unfold my long legs. Stand. One hand splayed against the (rough, dirty) wall. Around me: fading sounds of the man that I shot at (“I only shot at his foot, John,” I say out loud, even though John is gone. “I only shot at his foot and I didn't even hit him. Don't be dramatic.”) the noise of his shuffling steps growing fainter and fainter the longer I wait. Fact: there wasn't anyone with him when I fired my gun, and fact: no one cares who gets shot at in the part of the city that I'm mucking about in. (As soon as he's gone, I am free to go.)

I put my (right) hand in the deep pocket of my coat and begin to walk down the alley. I hang my head low. Walk as quietly as I possibly can (very quiet) barring the occasional crunch of glass underfoot.

I am going back to where I'm currently staying.

But I'm not coming home. Not for a long time.


	6. One of Those Terrible Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right, so, nothing from now onward is even going to be close to canon. So enjoy!

SIX MONTHS AFTER THE FALL

JOHN'S POV

 _Sherlock._

_Well. I'm back. Everyone's being nice. It's stifling. People come in and they treat me like I'm the patient, avoiding topics of conversation such as:_

__

  * _You_

__

  * _Mysteries_

__

  * _Tall buildings_

__

  * _Anything even that has even a smidge of a hint of a reference to you somewhere in it at all_



_It's meant to be kind, I know, but I almost relish those patients that come in every few weeks or so and give me hell about “running about with that lying detective wannabe” and “misleading the innocent public” and, occasionally, “tormenting poor Richard Brook.” That last one really set me off, and I launched about twelve feet into the air out of my seat before landing on the bloke and beating the shite out of him. Almost got sacked for it. Almost wish I had. They wrote it off, though, telling me they would overlook it as a product of my “recent emotional trauma.”_

_I find it slightly hilarious that so many people can discount your fall like some sort of unfortunate but impermanent mental condition that I'll just have to get over. They call you things like that all the time. Recent emotional trauma. Depression. PTSD. (That's an entirely different thing.) (Is it bad that you've upset me more than anything else that's ever happened to me? I've had my shoulder shot straight through, and that didn't affect me anywhere near as much as you do.) (Damn you, Sherlock Holmes.) When they say these things, I know they mean when you jumped, but I want to tell them. I want to tell them that if you weren't you and you had still jumped, then I would be fine. If you weren't you, but anyone else, and you had made me watch as you leaped to your death, I would have been back on my feet in a few weeks. Damn you, Sherlock Holmes. Damn you straight to hell._

_I miss you._

_John._

SHERLOCK'S POV

I am developing excellent peripheral vision.

“You're a nutter, you know that?” John pants. Out of the corner of my eyes I can see him, jogging to keep up with me. It annoys me that I can't turn and look at him fully. (This is, of course, because he isn't really there and I've simply constructed him from bits and pieces of the real John that I have scattered about in my Mind Palace in a way to cope with the loss of my best and most treasured homo sapien companion. Doesn't make it any less annoying.) “Absolute nutter. There's no way you can outrun them, you idiot.”

I want to answer him but, fact: my breath feels like it's being ripped out of my chest by something with very long, very sharp claws, and using any of that precious air to form words just to quarrel with John would be fantastically stupid. So instead I dart to the left.

I don't know where I am anymore. (In Serbia. I know I'm in Serbia. That's it.) I've stumbled my way into some sort of open courtyard, all dark and shadowed, and my feet echo with a loudness that makes me cringe on the flagstones. John: running beside me (on the right), a smudge of familiar gray and cream and stripes beside me, footfalls silent. I envy him. My (would be) captors: just feet behind me, all four of them. (I take a tiny bit of pleasure in the fact that their footsteps are even louder than mine. Blundering fools.)

“Well I see that catty motivation isn't helping you, eh?” John growls. “Fine.” Voice: taking on a different tone. He sounds more like my John now, the John at home, and less like phantom-John. (He sounds scared.) (It terrifies me.) “Sherlock, love, running behind you are four highly trained assassins with fully loaded assault rifles. I know you can't breathe well right now, and I know all you want to do is stop and sleep─” (He's right. I'm so _tired_ , more tired than I've ever been before) “─but listen to me. If you get caught, you're never going to see me again. And neither of us want that.”

I skirt the edge of a fountain. Feel the cool mist of it sneak down the collar of my coat.

I run.

JOHN'S POV

_Sherlock._

_Saw Molly today. She didn't ask me to tell you hullo specifically, but I'm sure she wanted to. Was always this side of in love with you, was Molly. We all were, you know. Some of us more than others._

_Anyway. Hullo from me and Molly._

_Come home._

_John._

SHERLOCK'S POV

They catch me.

And I am furious. Furious because my body has never given up on my like this, isn't _supposed_ to give up on me, is supposed to go and go and go and go like it always has. Not freeze in the middle of a road. Not collapse out from under my own mind, hit the cold concrete with a crack, and refuse to move even when four men kick it and slam down on it with the butts of their quite large guns.

I try to twist out of their tight grip. (Voices above me. Sharp and cold, a language that I never bothered to learn. Jeering.) Try: fail. Hands grabbing at my limp arms, squeezing my (now bruised) ribs as they haul me to my feet and begin to drag me.

“John.” (I wonder when I started saying his name instead of calling for help.) I feel like I'm screaming, but in my ears I hear only the harsh, unfamiliar taunts of the men who are hurting me, and my throat feels like someone has taken a dull knife and shredded it. I want to see him, and I want to touch him, but my eyes won't open and _none of me will move─_

“Sherlock, fight back.” Voice: quite close, somewhere above my (right) ear, and rushed. Scared. I try to do what he tells me, but... but...

“C'mon, Sherlock, c'mon, just _move_ , just punch one, please─

“John I can't,” I whisper. (I think I whisper. I either whisper it or nothing comes out at all.) (Because, even though they have caught me, and even though they are beating me to a pulp, and even though they are more likely than not taking me someplace where I will die, I don't want these four men to know that I communicate with a hallucination of my best friend every few seconds. Pride is a shallow thing.)

Pain, suddenly: exploding out in a spiral from my core down into my limbs. Feel like I've been struck by lightening. Feel like there is fire lighting me up from the inside out. My eyes fly open, and a gasping moan is forced out of my mouth, taking any last shred of my breath with it. Four dark faces swim above me: features lost in shadow, nothing but glinting teeth visible to my watering eyes. One of them has a black thing in the shape of a stubby gun. My delayed brain realizes now that it's a taser, and that I am shaking, convulsing, every single part of me out of control. My back bows up off of the cold ground and then slams back down, over and over again. Vision: narrowing to a tunnel. Breath: short─short─

Blackness.

NINE MONTHS AFTER THE FALL

JOHN'S POV

_Sherlock._

_Today was one of those really terrible days._

_You know the ones. The ones where every little thing reminds you of your dead best friend, from your morning tea to the guy you see crossing in front of your cab to the way a female patient that you can't remember the name of ties her scarf. The ones where you can't remember why you thought anything was worth it and you end up in a graveyard at ten o'clock in the evening while all of your living mates are off at the pub doing normal things._

_Oh yeah. I'm at your grave now. Just in case you wanted to stop by. You probably don't, though. There's nothing much to see here. Just a funny little man sitting in the dirt, scribbling in a tattered notebook and very decidedly not crying. Boring._

_It was a dream I had that brought me here, you see._

_Started out like the night that I met you. You'd run off with that cabby without telling anybody (did I ever tell you how stupid that was? I probably did. Oh well. That was fucking stupid, Sherlock) and I was making my way toward you, running about London like a chicken with my head cut off. Cut to the part where I'm in the building next to yours and aiming my gun at the cabby who's in there trying to make you kill yourself (I have a couple of things to say. Firstly, yes, I do see the irony. Secondly, what the hell was I thinking, Sherlock? I'd not even know you forty eight hours then. You were just too damn YOU, if that makes sense. Never mind, I know it doesn't make any sense) when suddenly there are all these people in there with you, dressed in black and swarming you, knocking me to the ground and beating the shite out of you. And I shoot at them, I shoot at them over and over and over again with my own puny gun, but the bullets just bounce right off of them and fall to the floor. And pretty soon I can't see you anymore, but it gets worse, because then I can hear you, and you're screaming, these great, gasping, absolutely tortured screams, and there's not one single thing that I can do._

_I woke up before it ended. But Sherlock..._

_Jesus. I don't have to ask you again, do I? I'm not going to. You know. This time I just want to say... fight back. Because in the dream you didn't, and I'm not saying that I've developed psychic abilities since you've been gone or anything, I'm just saying..._

_Fine, I'll say it again. Come home._

_John._

SHERLOCK'S POV

After twelve weeks of the same thing, I usually become bored with it. My mind, always spinning, always working to collect as much new data as it can, usually shuts off when the data begins to repeat itself and I move on to something new.

I find now that there are three exceptions to that norm. First: John Watson (I find him endlessly fascinating: the way he takes his tea, the product that he puts in his hair, that expression he gets on his face when I do something clever.) Second: murder. (Not committing. Investigating.) Third: being tortured.

It isn't that I like being tortured. In fact, there are few things on this earth that I like less. But as these men gather around me and lash my bare back for the twelfth time in the past month, my brain will not stop taking it in. Every single sting of the metal wire that they are flogging me with shoots a sharp, rippling wave of pain throughout my body. It sticks in my brain and my brain records it all (even though I don't want it to) burying it away in my Mind Palace. I try to delete it after every one of these sessions but, fact: in order to delete something I have to review it, to replay it, to run my mind over the details, and my body is never strong enough to undertake that agony two times right in a row.

I am on my knees now. Arms out to my sides. Taught. Fists wrapped up in rope, rope connected to metal brackets in the walls. Holding me up. Neck: hanging, loose, my head too heavy to try to hold up. Can feel something warm and slick running down the curve of the (right) side of my rib cage. Coming from a burning slice on my (right) shoulder blade. Blood. Real blood this time, not like when I fell.

Noise, too: my own breath, loud and crowded in the shell of my ears, intermittent moans that eek there way out of my throat providing a muffled undertone. Grunts above me as one man steps back, tenses his shoulders and biceps, grits his teeth, swings─connects solidly with my spine. My own back buckles forward, and my arms are wrenched backward in their sockets as I fall.

John is standing in the corner of the room next to another man in a dark green coat and muffler, yelling obscenities at my torturers that I don't bother to listen to. I don't look at John (that's getting easier to do) but I look at the other man as the wire is brought down upon me again and again and as tears spring to my eyes and run down my dirty cheeks. I want him to see. I want him to see what they are doing to me─

He steps forward. His face is in shadow, but I know who it is. John stops yelling (I wish I had been paying attention. He comes up with quite colorful things when he really gets going) and falls silent, and, miraculously, the men beating me fall a few steps back.

The room hangs. (Waits.)

The man in green says a few short words in the harsh language of this country and the two men leave. (The one with the wire lets it drag on the floor behind him, and I see a trail of blood mar the dirty concrete. My blood.) He stands perfectly still, arms folded behind his back, head listed to the left, and we do not move until the echo of booted feet fades away from hearing.

(John is gone. I think he left after the two men who were beating me did, but he isn't real, and so I am not as disappointed as I would otherwise be. I miss my own John too much to miss this incorporeal one as well.)

Finally the man in green tips his head up, and his face is revealed to me. He smiles.

“Hello, brother dear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not too much longer until the part that I know you're all really here for... be patient, my loves. And as always, thanks for reading/kudo-ing/bookmarking. I'll stop asking for comments when John and Sherlock stop being two idiots in love ;)


	7. To Hell and Back and Back Again

SHERLOCK'S POV

Mycroft brought me home. I hadn't been to my childhood home in years (parents always came to London to see me, and I always made sure that was when John was out. Mummy is just as smart as me or Mycroft. She'd have seen right through the way I feel about John in an instant, and I couldn't have that) and I found that there wasn't much I missed.

Correction: there were other things in my life that I missed more.

Mummy and Dad were smotheringly attentive. (“Really, Sherlock! Pretending to be dead for nine months! And going to get yourself beat into nearly a pulp, what _will_ we do with you, love.”) I did my very best to pretend that I hated it, but know they didn't believe me for a second. However I think Mummy, at least, saw how anxious I was to be getting back home.

Back to John.

Which is why I am now (twelve hours after arriving back in England) in one of Mycroft's private cars, speeding to London, at the insistence of my parents. Fact: sometimes, when on the receiving side, sentiment is not the beast of a thing that I make it out to be.

Mycroft is not with me. I declined his accompaniment. While I understand the fact that Mycroft and I lost all connection when I was kidnapped back in Serbia, and while I understand that he couldn't possibly have gotten there faster than he did, I still fail to understand why he stood there and watched them whip me. In my (factually correct) opinion, that's taking childhood grudges just a step too far. So the car I sit in now is empty, the slick leather seats cool to my touch in spite of the heated air filling the cabin. I lean slightly forward, elbows on my knees, hands steepled under my chin. The seat belt that Dad told me to wear hangs unbuckled beside me.

Nervous. I'm nervous.

John thinks I'm dead. (Rightfully. For all intents and purposes, that fall killed me.) (For all intents and purposes, I'm still supposed to be dead.) (But I want to see him. Need to see him.) (He won't tell.) What if he has moved on with his life, like Myroft said he had? Found a new flatmate, a new friend, a new love... (I swallow dryly. Shift in my seat. The wounds on my back tug, and I wince.)

Heart rate: accelerating. Accelerating, and he isn't even here, isn't even touching me or even looking at me. Phantom-John hasn't been back since Mycroft retrieved me from that Serbian prison. Don't know if I'm relieved or disappointed. A bit of both. Relieved because I won't have to not look at him, disappointed because even that little, false bit of John was better than nothing.

“You'll have the real thing soon,” I say aloud to myself. My own voice startles me. Car is silent, nothing but the smooth whir of tires on unblemished asphalt and soft breathing of the driver to distract me. (Driver doesn't look back.) (I bet Mycroft paid him to ignore me.) (Arse.)

Gingerly, I lean back (careful not to put too much weight on the barely-healed wounds) and turn my head to the left. Scenery spins past the window in a blur. I give up trying to focus on it and let my eyes shift, lids growing heavy as everything swirls together. It's a dark purple night out there. Silently, I urge the driver to go faster. Fact: we are still thirty one minutes and twelve-point-fifteen seconds away from John's flat, and it's already ten o'clock in the evening. John goes to bed at eleven o'clock but begins his bedtime routine at ten thirty seven, and I know how much he hates being interrupted.

Although, I suppose being interrupted by one's dead ex-flatmate is rather less annoying than being interrupted by one's living, current flatmate who simply wants you to hold the corpse up while you throw darts in its eyeballs.

With each minute that passes, I feel my nervousness grow. Inexplicable. Fact: I am John's friend; heard him say so to everyone when he was trying to take my pulse. Fact: He seemed very distraught at my grave back after I first fell. Fact: he is better with me in his life. So, logically, I should have nothing at all to be nervous about.

(I remember Evelyn. Remember how I almost ruined his life that night.) (But then I bought him milk. He liked the milk.) (And then I hugged him, and he let me, and he called me perfect, which is factually untrue but made me feel wonderful and warm inside anyway.)

We are almost at his flat. I see, through the dimness of the atmosphere, rows of careful, modern buildings, flats that are one story and only two sided. The suburbs. Complete with shrubs and porridge-colored siding. The most un-John Watson place that I have ever seen. The car coasts to a stop in front of one of these identical buildings and I open the door with hurried movements, pouring out of the heated space and into the cold air outside, and only half register the pain that I feel in my back and ribs. Walk, faster than I have ever walked, up the sidewalk and to the door.

Mycroft got John's address. Gave it to me. (Debate saying thank you.) I memorized in in point-two seconds, and it swims before my eyes now even as I see it appear on the door in front of me. 177A, Fletcher Row.

Raise my hand. (Shaking. Hard.) Lower my knuckles to the beige door, once, twice, thrice─

Door swings inward.

John.

  
  


 

JOHN'S POV

I pick up the remote and aim it absently at the telly. Click the little red button in the top right corner and wait for the screen to lighten from dark black to dark blue and then, at last, to come slowly into existence. (It's one of those old tellys that makes weird zapping noises and flashes the picture in a grainy way ever few minutes, but I don't pay attention to it even when it's on, so that doesn't matter.) As Time Goes By is on, some old re-runs, and Judi Dench scowls out at me while she gives someone hell. It's oddly comforting, and so I turn the volume up while I go make a cuppa.

I lean one hip against the counter while I wait for the kettle to sound. Probably shouldn't be drinking anything right before bed, but the last week has been one of the worst ones since he left, and so I'll risk having to get up a few times in the night for some comfort.

I don't know why I've suddenly fallen into some sort of relapse these past few days. All I know is that every waking second I've spent counting the months and weeks and days and hours and minutes since the last time I saw him. The last time he saw _me._

Nine months, six days, and seven hours

It's a bit anal, I know. I also don't care.

Keeps my mind off of the other things that I'd be thinking about otherwise. Things like smashed skulls and strings of blood, wide, glassy, staring eyes, red against pale skin, billowing coats and wheeling limbs and crunching noises...

My stomach heaves, once, and I turn quickly to face the counter, fingers digging in tightly to the granite slab. Tip my chin down and remind myself to breathe. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight, repeat until heart is still and lungs aren't broken. Just like Ella told me. (Ella's a shite therapist, but her universally taught, universally learned breathing techniques are alright.)

And I am embarrassed, standing here alone in my kitchen in my socks and trousers and jumper, having a panic attack because my dead best friend won't leave my mind alone. Not when I'm awake, and certainly not when I'm asleep.

Three knocks come, muffled sounding, hesitant, on my front door. I debate ignoring it. Just standing here and not moving and staring at my kettle until whoever it is goes away, and then I can go back to wallowing in grief and self-loathing. But something about that idea seems dangerous, and so I force my feet to move until I'm standing in front of my door.

There is someone there on the other side. Waiting for me. Probably just one of the neighbors.

My heart is doing that thing where it tries its best to take up residence in the middle of my throat.

I reach out a shaky hand and open the door.

When I see who is standing on the other side, I'm transported back to that day nine months, six days, and seven hours ago: a red light of warning is flashing over and over behind my eyelids, blaring a death knell in my ears, and the pit of my stomach feels like the ocean, roaring and roiling. My knees turn to liquid and I slump sideways, catching myself on the door frame.

This cannot be happening.

“Hello, John.” He says it simply. (He says it at all, which is the real marvel.)

This cannot be happening.

Shaking, my eyes rove over every inch of him in seconds, scanning, checking, drinking him in. He is thinner than he was, cheeks sunken in, and his bony wrists stick out, twig-like, from under the cuff of his coat. His shoulders are slightly hunched. Seems stiff. And his eyes─ _fuck_ , his _eyes_ ─they're staring out at me in that _way_ , sending something toward me that tunnels straight into my chest and hooks me, pulling me forward─

And before I know what I'm doing, I'm on top of him.

Not in the way that I'd think about as I sat there in my chair all those evenings and watched him romance his violin. (I always told myself that I was just lonely. Would go out, meet a woman, date her for a while, and then be thinking those exact same things about the wrong person again come two weeks.) No: this way is throbbing fists and red-hot rage, the back of his head slamming into concrete as I throw him to the ground and knock the top of my head into his chin. His is bony beneath me, and as my heart races and my blood rages audibly through my veins, all I want to do is wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze and _feel_ his pulse at the base of his neck, feel his short breaths lap (wet, hot) at my temples─

He's dead. He was dead. He _is dead._ I saw him, saw it with my own eyes, _Christ_ he made me _watch._ Nobody, not even Sherlock goddamn fucking Holmes could have survived that plunge, that stomach turning crunch of these same bones under my hands on cold, hard pavement.

He makes a sound like a groan as I take my fist and slam it, over and over and over again into one of his gorgeous cheekbones. My other hand digs into his right shoulder and holds me up as I lift myself to give me some leverage. Down, down, down, until finally I see blood, feel puffy skin, unnaturally hot on my bleeding knuckles.

I realize that I am screaming something as I attack him (he isn't fighting back. Why isn't he fighting back? I'm going to kill him if he doesn't do something soon, I don't think I can stop myself, and then he really will be gone) but there's such a cavernous roaring in my ears that I can't hear a thing. Seems to upset him, though, or maybe it's just the fact that I have both of his shoulders in my grip now and I'm straddling his hips (again: still not sexy) as I lift him up and then slam him down, his neck whipping loosely. His eyes are open and they're huge and they're wet, and he's biting his lips so hard that I see blood there, too, and I want to lick it off─

“ _John_ ,” he says finally, the single syllable coming out more of a moan than an actual word. His throat hitches, and a drop of blood trickles from the cut high under his eye and down one thin cheek. Immediately after he says my name he bites his lips hard one more and his eyebrows crash together as he winces. Like he can't believe he actually said something. Like it's the worst thing he's ever done.

Slowly, the screaming red lights that flare inside of me die. I let go of his shoulders. Breathing?... barely, him, entirely too hard, me. He falls against my sidewalk. Head makes a thunking noise.

I sit back. Shake. Hard.

He keeps his eyes open. Shaking too. Harder than I am. I think he's crying, but he doesn't look like he knows.

(In fact, the bastards staring at me like... like...) (God, why is he looking at me like that?)

I'm still furious. I still want to wrap my hands around something and squeeze all of the breath out of it. I just don't know if I want it to be him.

I'm standing, suddenly, with no memory of how I got to my feet. Backing away so fast that I trip over the threshold and stumble backwards through the open door. I stare down at him and he stares back at me, his arms and legs sprawled, his neck kinked, his face swollen and bruised and bloody, and he _smiles._

“Get out of here.” It's on a whisper. I can't make myself say anything louder because my throat is hoarse and burning from whatever I've just been yelling at him. “Go back to wherever the hell you were, Sherlock Holmes, and never come into my life again.”

He sits up slowly. I can tell it's a struggle but he doesn't ask for help. Props himself up with visibly shaking arms. “John...” (Whispered, too.)

“You,” I say. Feel the cold seep in through my socked feet. Feel his blood on my hands. Burning.“Have ruined me.”

Sherlock opens his mouth slightly. His swollen bottom lip drips with thick scarlet and taunts me. “I'm sorry─”

“Go to hell.”

I slam the door.

Once it's closed I fall to me knees and bury my head in my hands and let the sobs that I've been holding back for months wrack me. And it is only much later, after I feel so empty inside that a breeze would blow me away, that I let myself look outside.

He's gone. Nothing but a few drops of blood remain.

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the torture. (The kind that I'm inflicting on our boys and, in turn, all of you.) I promise it'll be over soon. Whether that's a good or a bad thing you won't know until the next chapter... *waggles eyebrows* Until then, thank you so much for reading! Constructive criticism much appreciated.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone that read this. Please enjoy!

JOHN'S POV

I lay in bed and stare up at the gray expanse of ceiling above me. I'm on top of the sheets, the cool air wafting over me, and they're taut beneath my back as I try to relax the stiff set of my shoulders.

I don't know how long I've been laying here in the dark, waiting for sleep to claim me and trying to force images of him out of my head.

Sherlock. He's _alive._ He's come back home to me, just like I've been asking him to on paper every day since he left. And I just beat him up and told him to go away again.

Forever.

(A feeling, deep inside my core, like something's been ripped out and stepped on and put back in again upside down. Everything is off kilter, wrong. Missing. Even though he's here, even though he isn't dead.)

I sit up fast and swing my legs over the edge of the bed all in one movement. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but I realize this feeling is one of pure terror, ripping me apart and hollowing me out. And as I run through my flat (pull on shoes, slide parka over threadbare pyjamas, get keys off the hook by the door, trot down the sidewalk and slide into the car) I realize something else: it isn't me I'm scared for.

This drive across London is faster than anything legal, and it still doesn't feel fast enough. I'm not really sure where I'm headed, only that I need to find him and─and─

And what? This feeling of fear is strange and only half familiar. I haven't felt it (not for nine months, six days and seven─no ten─hours) in so long that it shocks me all over again, just like that first night. That night where I sealed my fate by aiming a pistol through layers of glass on a hunch and shooting a man that I wasn't even positive was guilty. I'm never scared for myself, not really. I've faced things that I've never told anyone about with a firm stance and an iron-banded heart and a fully loaded machine gun without breaking a sweat. But the minute somebody looks at him... the minute he takes a risk with just a bit too much chance of failure, or the minute someone's arm swings an inch too close...

Like mine did.

I growl something (just a noise. I'm past intelligible speech) and slam the flat of my palm down on the steering wheel. Horn sounds loudly, breaking the facade of silence that's been surrounding me and prompting a cacophony of my fellow drivers annoyed blasts back at me. I curse at them all, loudly and in the safety of my tiny car, and press down on the gas.

When I finally pull my car to a stop I glance out the window at where I am and start.

Bart's. I'm at Bart's-bloody-Hospital. Of course.

I haven't been back here one single time since Sherlock jumped. I don't _want_ to be here now. But there's a twisted, honed-in part of me that's forcing my hand to put the car in park and forcing my eyes up the brown side of the building. Slowly, inch by inch, and finally they get to the top─

Mother of God.

I throw my door open and jump out into traffic. Leaving the door open, I take off at a run.

  
  


 

 

SHERLOCK'S POV

I sit on the edge of the roof of St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

My legs dangle over the side of the building, and occasionally my heels knock into the creamy stone, although never by my own doing. Shoulders: curled in and up. Arms: wrapped tightly about my ribs in the hope that maybe pressure will help abate the frankly crippling ache that the fresh injuries sustained there are providing. Eyes: closed. Head: tipped back, freezing air brushing across my features and stirring my hair.

Fact: I'm working up bravery.

I'm not the brave one. Never have been. When I was young it was Mycroft's criticism that kept me doing dangerous things on my own, that constant pushing and prodding propelling me to greater and greater things. (Never told him. Never will. Laugh a little, at that.) Then, when it became inconvenient for us to be in the same room together, it was drugs that blurred my sense of reality and kept me rash and daring. Finally, after both of these things, there was an infinitely better motivator in the form of a short army doctor with a limp and beautiful eyes and a way of looking at me that effectively banished all of my fear. He was the brave one. (John.) Not me.

There's no one now.

I feel something behind me. (Something that, against my will, slows my heart rate down by ten percent and somehow, inexplicably, eases the pain coursing through my bruised body.)

Tea. Jam. Sunlight. Rage.

I don't have to look up to know he's here. John.

I sit up straight and my eyes fly open. The height of my position hits me, suddenly, in the chest and my breath is gone. I remember the last time I was up here, John on the pavement looking up at me... John... John...

He doesn't say anything and neither do I. (Couldn't if I tried.) Feet: scuff on the dirty roof as he makes his way slowly─ _agonizingly_ slowly─closer to me. (He's treating me like a scared animal, he's treating me so... so **─so** ─)

And John is inches from me now. (Brace myself for what comes next. A punch, a slap, two hands firmly against my shoulder blades and a sharp push over the edge.) His breathing is heavy and erratic and I ache when I feel it on the back of my neck, so _close_ ─

Two warm arms slide around my waist. His hands lock tightly together right under my ribs, warm and shaking, and his soft head falls forward and comes to rest right at the nape of my neck.

“Sherlock,” he whispers. (Fact: he's crying. I can feel it on my cold skin. Warm as blood.) “ _Stay._ ”

I try to say something, I really do, but there's a knot of something in my throat keeping any noise from escaping. _I will do anything that you wish of me, John,_ I want to say. _I will throw myself off of this building or I will turn myself back in to that prison in Serbia or I will come back home and curl up inside of you and let you cry against my neck._ Instead I gag, and gasp, and for some reason pitch forward a little bit.

“ _No_ ,” he says. Voice: low, hoarse, tangled. He pulls back against me and I slide backward off of the edge that I'm sitting on and straight into his lap. (He must have dropped to his knees at some point to catch me. For some reason the realization makes me cry.) “Absolutely not. Not again. Never.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. (Crying makes the knot go away. While normally I would not endorse tears, in this situation it seems not only inevitable but necessary.) Bring my hands up to grip his and squeeze as tight as I possibly can. “I'm so, so sorry John, I'm sorry...”

“I know,” he murmurs. “Jesus, Sherlock, I'm sorry too─”

“I couldn't tell you. They were going to _shoot_ you, John, with a _gun_ ─”

“Sherlock.” His voice is textured with layers of roughness, and it wraps around me and scrapes me gently. I want to shut up and to lean back (into him) but this is one of those times where my brain isn't in control of my body. I keep talking instead.

“And even though Moriarty is dead his network certainly isn't. It spans the globe like some sort of conflagration, and obviously I was the only candidate who could even possibly have a chance at putting it out. I would have done it any way, even if I didn't have a chance, you know that, John. No one would have been able to stop me if it meant I had a chance at keeping you safe─”

“Sherlock, shut your great, stupid, beautiful mouth and turn around,” John hisses. Breath: whispering across my skin and raising all the hairs on my body, every last one, to a complete stand. I shiver, and do as he says (would do anything he says) turning somewhat awkwardly (somewhat painfully) in his lap. Face him now. Stretch legs out, curl them around his hips. Sink posterior between his knees.

I see him now, for the first time since he came up to this roof. His hair is in disarray (just how I like it) and his eyes are wide and glimmering (the color of a lake that I visited with my family one summer when I was five) and his mouth is shut very, very tightly.

“You don't have to...” I say, staring at it. My hands are shaking (and my heart is pounding) and so I act on impulse and slide them up under the edge of his neatly zipped parka. This, as it turns out, is a brilliant idea. (One of my best.) I let my fingers wander a bit, and they smooth the warm cotton of his pyjamas (he's wearing pyjamas) (he didn't even change into trousers to come find me) (I'm overwhelmed with _feeling_ ) before coming to rest against his waist.

John releases his lips from their toothy hold. They fall open. Bite marks around the inside that I want to touch. “I know,” he says. He's missing every other breath, just like I am. Makes his cheeks a bit rosy. “I missed you so much,” he whispers, and then he's leaning in─

And then he's kissing me.

It isn't the most glamorous kiss, as kisses go. (I've seen the films.) There is no great crescendo of a heartthrobbing sonata, no explosions of fireworks above our heads. I jump when he does it, and my eyes widen, and I accidentally pinch his waist between my long fingers. Our lips are sort of mashed together, closed (no tongue. This is real life, not my imagination) but still undeniably touching. My blogger brings his hands up and places them (feather-light) one on the back of my head (touches my hair with ghosted fingers) and one on the (left) side of my neck.

Something sudden and inferno-esque overtakes me. Fact: I want to wrap him up tightly and bring him closer. I want to open my mouth, let him touch me in the way that I've dreamed about since the moment I met him. I want to not be here, on the freezing rooftop at midnight in a chilly London fog; I want to be back home, back at _our_ home, intertwined somewhere warm and safe where I can be Sherlock and he can be John (and he can kiss me better).

Instead, I settle simply for closing my eyes. Because it's enough that he's here with me. Not countries and oceans away. Not knocking me senseless (although if he wanted to, I would let him). And it's shocking enough that he's kissing me at all.

(Pressure lets up from John. I realize that I've been utterly unresponsive to this display, and hope he doesn't care.) (Because there is not a single cell in my body that isn't on fire.)

He finally pulls away: just enough that a few inches of cold air hover between us. John's eyes now: still deep, still glimmering, still blue, but now something else. Now deeper, fuller somehow, and I can see myself reflected in them. Two tiny Sherlocks, faces utterly pale. (Not like any lake at all any longer. More.)

John licks his lips. (I'm not a swearing man. But _fuck._ ) The lines on his face are more prominent than when I left him.

“Also,” he says, those eyes flickering down as I lick my own lips, tasting the bit of John Watson left there. “I love you.”

There are two hundred and seventy three things that I wish to say in response to this. As they spin through my mind, I feel my heart swell (not possible, I know, but─) and I slide my arms further around him. Only words that come out of me, however, are, “But you aren't gay.”

Stare: just for a seven seconds (didn't count, brain can just tell. We do this a lot) (stare, I mean) before he smiles at me. The sweetest, most valuable smile in existence; the one that pulls his eyebrows down a little on the outside edges, and makes his face go soft, and positively turns my internal organs to liquid. “Sherlock,” he says softly. (Wonder if he can feel my pulse hammering in the side of my neck. Probably can. He's a doctor, after all.) Shakes his head a little. Not chidingly, not pityingly, but almost wonderingly. “I know now that that's the last thing that matters when it comes to you and me. I would love you if you were a man or a woman or neither or both or anything on this earth. I was... I was a git, all those times people thought they saw something between us and I told them there wasn't anything there. You,” and he leans in, touches my forehead with his, and I smile, “are the exception to everything, and there's been something there since the moment I handed you my phone in that lab.”

The atmosphere surrounding us is cold, but we've created a pocket of warmth that fills the tiny spaces our limbs don't touch and slowly works on expanding a few inches around our tangled bodies. I close my eyes again. (Too much. Just want to feel.) “I love you too,” I say softly.

(And I'm beaming. The biggest, most stupid grin I've ever worn. Fact: feels unexpectedly good.)

“If I hadn't... If... I'm sorry. About earlier.” Low. Hurting.

(Grin softens into a quieter smile.) I pull him in to me, and he rests his head the the hollow between my neck and my clavicle. “I'm sorry too. Again.”

“You were doing what you had to do. I was being a cock.” Laughs: one time, against my chest, sharper than any sound indicative of real amusement. “I shouldn't have gone ballistic on you like that. I shouldn't have questioned it. I should have just kissed you then.” He raises his head and looks me in the eyes, and something about that probing glance makes me sweat. In a good way. “Hell, I should have just kissed you years ago and been done with all of this. I mean, if we could have been doing this─” he makes a quick gesture with his (right) hand in the space between us─ “the whole time...”

“Well, yes, that would... that would have been nice,” I admit. (Would have been more than nice. Would have been perfect.) “But you didn't, and I'm back now, and we've both confessed, so do you think...” I trail off. I'm disconcerted to feel my skin heating up (from forehead to chest) as he gives me that look that I'm finding impossible to explain. (Hate not being able to explain things.)

“Do I think what?” He raises one eyebrow. (Oh.)

Scratch that. Back up, start again. “I'm going to kiss you.”

(There are a million things we still have to talk about. My time away. Serbia. What he did while I was gone. Where the two of us are going to go from here. And there are a million things we still have to do, as well, getting off of this roof being a primary one, but somehow I think all of those can wait thirty seconds more. Or possibly a minute.)

A smile from John. Big, like mine, and sunny, and beautiful, and I'm home now. He leans back in. “Sounds fantastic─” he begins.

“Staggering,” I correct as I lean in too.

“Staggering,” he amends softly.

Fact: And so I do.

 


End file.
